In recent years, scholars in the classics, English and American literature, history, and other humanistic disciplines have increasingly used information technology to make available facsimiles of rare manuscripts; to archive, index, and annotate literary, artistic, and scholarly materials; to link text, visual images, and sound in new ways; and to create new social arrangements that will bring scholars and students together to blur the boundaries between learning, teaching, and research.

To recognize the contributions of scholars who have advanced humanistic scholarship and teaching through the innovative use of information technology, the National Humanities Center created the Richard W. Lyman Award. Presented each year from 2002-06, the Lyman Award recipient were honored for efforts that created new knowledge in some domain of the humanities; that embodied technological innovation with broad application in scholarship and teaching; that addressed social, cultural, and/or economic issues in the creation and dissemination of scholarly work in the contemporary world; and/or work that used technology in new ways to bring the results of humanistic scholarship to student and public audiences.

Named for Richard W. Lyman, president of Stanford University from 1970-80 and of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1980-88, the Lyman Award was made possible through the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation. Each recipient received a prize of $25,000 and was invited to present a talk to Fellows of the Center and the public on matters pertaining to their work, their vision for the future of the digital humanities as a field, and the challenges and opportunities confronting humanists operating in a digital world.

Collected here in a printable, downloadable format are edited versions of presentations from each of the five recipients, along with a foreword from James O'Donnell, provost of Georgetown and chairman of the Lyman selection committee.

John M. UnsworthDean, Graduate School of Library
and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Director, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities,
University of Virginia (1993–2003)